Free Republic

Earth 'noise' could attract alien invaders 03 May 2008 From New Scientist Print Edition. No matter how quiet we try to be now it's too late to prevent alien invaders. So says Alexander Zaitsev of the Institute of Radio Engineering and Electronics in Moscow, Russia, who points the finger at astronomers. For 40 years, astronomers have fired microwaves off objects to chart near-Earth space and track the movement of close asteroids - and these signals are traceable back to us. By comparison, Zaitsev says, dedicated transmissions - often described as "shouting into an unknown jungle" - are a mere whisper....

POSTCARDS FROM THE FUTURE Sometime in the near future, humankind will set foot again on the Moon. As part of NASA's New Vision for Space Exploration, they will build a permanent base on the moon, to test, research and invent new technologies for manned missions to Mars and beyond. The task will not be easy - there will be danger and hardships and broken lives, but these modern-day pioneers would have it no other way. Because for all the hardships that they must endure, they know that the Grand Vision extends beyond them - that they are but a small...

A team of Italian and Chinese physicists on Wednesday renewed a controversial claim that they had detected the mysterious dark matter particles that astronomers say swaddle the galaxies in halos and direct the evolution of the universe. The team, called Dama, from “DArk MAtter,” and led by Rita Bernabei of the University of Rome, has maintained since 2000 that a yearly modulation in the rate of flashes in a detector nearly a mile underneath the Gran Sasso mountain in Italy is the result of the Earth’s passage through a “wind” of dark matter particles as it goes around the Sun....

HiRISE image of Stickney Crater on Phobos. Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona. Stickney crater is almost half the diameter of Phobos itself. Why did the impact not shatter this small moon? The color picture above is a composite from two pictures taken about 10 minutes apart in order to give the 3-dimensional aspect. A recent Picture of the Day described some of the large-scale formations on Phobos, especially Stickney Crater, but this more dramatic picture, which has recently become available, deserves another showing because it portrays the distinctive features of an Electric Discharge Machining (EDM) event with greater clarity. The...

A telescope on the far side of the moon could probe the "dark ages" of the universe while blocking out the radio-wavelength noise of Earth civilizations. Up to one hundred thousand antennas would form the Dark Ages Lunar Interferometer (DALI), the largest telescope ever built, and allow astronomers to hear faint whispering signals from a time when no stars even existed. "This will look at one of the most fundamental questions ever conceived, back when the universe was made up almost entirely of hydrogen and helium — no stars, no galaxies," said Kurt Weiler, senior astronomer at the U.S. Naval...

Although I suspect that intelligent life is rare in the cosmos, I’m playing little more than a hunch. So it’s interesting to see that Andrew Watson (University of East Anglia) has analyzed the chances for intelligence elsewhere in the universe by looking at the challenges life faced as it evolved. Watson believes that it took specific major steps for an intelligent civilization to develop on Earth, one of which, interestingly enough, is language. Identifying which steps are critical is tricky, but in the aggregate they reduce the chance of intelligence elsewhere. A linguist at heart, I wasn’t surprised with the...

Is this a planet in the making? A gap in the dust circling a young star in the constellation Auriga may mark where material is condensing into a planet, 11 astronomers led by Ben R. Oppenheimer of the American Museum of Natural History say in a paper to be published in The Astrophysical Journal. The group used an Air Force surveillance telescope at Haleakala Observatories on the Hawaiian island of Maui and a special camera to examine a region near the star AB Aurigae, corresponding to the scale of our own solar system, that had not been observed before at...

For decades, Soviet schoolchildren flocked to the Moscow Planetarium to gaze at the stars. Now plans to reopen the landmark silver-domed structure, shut for repairs 14 years ago, are mired in a struggle for control of an institution situated on a pricey patch of real estate. The conflict took a startling turn Wednesday when staffers say about 20 uniformed men forced their way onto the grounds, beat an unarmed employee and proclaimed that a new boss was in charge. It was a development that longtime director Igor Mikitasov described as a hostile takeover, Russian style. In the struggle for property...

An astronaut, Don Pettit, has put together a 10-minute movie of what cities look like at night as seen from space. He shot these images while he was Science Officer aboard ISS Expedition 6 about 5 years ago. He recently posted this on YouTube.This video "Cities at Night; an Orbital Tour Around the World" is a video made from digital still images.A bit of trivia.... most of the music during the movie is from royalty-free clips from Adobe Auditions, but for the Australian sequences, Don played his own didgeridoo that he had with him in space aboard ISS. As you...

TRIPLE FLYBY ALERT: Space shuttle Endeavour has undocked from the International Space Station and the two spaceships are now orbiting Earth in tandem. This sets the stage for a series of rare *triple* flybys, which many sky watchers will be able to observe on Tuesday, March 25th. It's a triple because three spacecraft are involved. First to appear is the European Space Agency's Jules Verne cargo carrier flying 2000 kilometers ahead of the ISS-Endeavour combo. Jules Verne is about as bright as a 1st magnitude star. Four minutes later, and even brighter, the space shuttle and space station follow Jules...

Images from the Hubble Space Telescope have revealed a so-called "ring of dark matter" circling a galaxy cluster. Does dark matter exist? Or is electricity a better explanation for the structure of the universe? {Galaxy Cluster CL0024+17 with an overlay showing a supposed dark matter ring. Credit: NASA, ESA, M. J. Jee and H. Ford et al. (Johns Hopkins University)} In a recent announcement, NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) reported the discovery of something in deep space that seems to confirm previously inferred observations of "dark matter." Although "dark matter" cannot be seen or detected by instruments, its...

NASA/JPL-Caltech An artistic rendering of a very young star encircled by a disk of gas and dust. The winking star has sand in its eye. Back in 2002, astronomers from Wesleyan University concluded that a star brightening and waning in an unusual 48-day rhythm was dipping in and out of stuff swirling around the star in a so-called protoplanetary disk. At the time one astronomer called the system “a Rosetta stone,” for understanding how planets form. Now, after six more years of observation with an international group of astronomers, led by William Herbst of Wesleyan, researchers say they know what...

Thanks to a lucky break and an overactive galaxy, astronomers have for the first time caught a massive star in the act of exploding. An X-ray outburst recently recorded by NASA's Swift satellite suggests that researchers began viewing the violent demise of a star in the galaxy NGC 2770 just a few seconds after the first X rays arrived at Earth, and hours before the first visible-light fireworks. Most supernovas aren't identified until they generate an outpouring of visible light, long after key information about the size and other properties of the collapsing star has vanished. The new finding suggests...

Earth may have a twin orbiting one of our nearest stellar neighbors, a new study suggests. University of California, Santa Cruz graduate student Javiera Guedes used computer simulations of planet formation to show that terrestrial planets are likely to have formed around one of the stars in the Alpha Centauri star system, our closest stellar neighbors. Guedes' model showed planets forming around the star Alpha Centauri B (its sister star, Proxima Centauri, is actually our nearest neighbor) in what is called the "habitable zone," or the region around a star where liquid water can exist on a planet's surface. The...

Earth could be in for a neighborhood dispute with a death star, according to an Australian astronomer. A spectacular rotating pinwheel system just down the astronomical road from Earth — 8,000 light years away — includes an unstable Wolf-Rayet star that could explode. Eight years ago, WR104 was discovered in the constellation Sagittarius by Sydney University astronomer Peter Tuthill. A Wolf-Rayet star is the last step on the way to a supernova — the explosion of a star at the end of its life. Images from the Mauna Kea in Hawaii telescope show that every eight months the two stars...

Enlarge ImageGrowing pains. This artist's conception shows a neutron star known as a magnetar crackling with extremely powerful magnetic activity.Credit: Gregg Dinderman/Sky & Telescope "When you hear hoofbeats," the old saying goes, "think horse, not zebra." But what if your horse suddenly grows zebra stripes? That's the predicament astronomers faced when a star they were observing--a rapidly spinning remnant of a supernova called a pulsar--started emitting powerful bursts of x-rays considered the hallmark of a much-rarer object called a magnetar. The finding strongly suggests that pulsars, also known as neutron stars, and magnetars are linked and paves the way...

Using a cosmic magnifying glass to peer into the deepest reaches of space, two teams of astronomers have discovered tiny galaxies that may be among the most distant known. Images suggest that one of the galaxies is so remote that the light now reaching Earth left this starlit body when the 13.7-billion-year-old universe was only about 700 million years old. The discoveries are important, notes Tim Heckman of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, because they probe a special time in the universe, when the cosmos changed from a place filled with neutral gas to a place ionized by the emergence...

I saw not only Atlantis and the International Space Station flyover my neighborhood tonight, but I also saw the spy satellite scheduled for missile destruction on Thursday/ Michelle Obama, eat your heart out. This is one proud American.

The Moon will turn an eerie shade of red for people in the western hemisphere late Wednesday and early Thursday, recreating the eclipse that saved Christopher Columbus more than five centuries ago. In a lunar eclipse, the Sun, Earth and Moon are directly aligned and the Moon swings into the cone of shadow cast by the Earth. But the Moon does not become invisible, as there is still residual light that is deflected towards it by our atmosphere. Most of this refracted light is in the red part of the spectrum and as a result the Moon, seen from Earth,...

Space Weather News for Feb. 17, 2008 http://spaceweather.com DOUBLE FLYBY: If all goes according to plan, space shuttle Atlantis will undock from the International Space Station (ISS) on Monday morning, Feb. 18th, at approximately 4:30 am EST. This is good news for sky watchers across North America who will be able to witness a rare double flyby on Monday evening. Atlantis and the ISS will appear as a tight pair of lights, as bright as Jupiter or Venus, gliding in tandem across the twilight sky--an unforgettable sight. Favored cities include Los Angeles, New Orleans, Dallas, Jackson (MS), Pensacola, Philadelphia, Reno,...

http://www.heavens-above.com/main.aspx?lat=34.052&lng=-118.243&loc=Los+Angeles&alt=115&tz=PST

Astronomers said Wednesday that they had found a miniature version of our own solar system 5,000 light-years across the galaxy — the first planetary system that really looks like our own, with outer giant planets and room for smaller inner planets. “It looks like a scale model of our solar system,” said Scott Gaudi, an assistant professor of astronomy at Ohio State University. Dr. Gaudi led an international team of 69 professional and amateur astronomers who announced the discovery in a news conference with reporters. Their results are being published Friday in the journal Science. The discovery, they said, means...

Saturn's smoggy moon Titan has hundreds of times more natural gas and other liquid hydrocarbons than all the known oil and natural gas reserves on Earth, scientists said today. The hydrocarbons rain from the sky on the miserable moon, collecting in vast deposits that form lakes and dunes. This much was known. But now the stuff has been quantified using observations from NASA's Cassini spacecraft. "Titan is just covered in carbon-bearing material — it's a giant factory of organic chemicals," said Ralph Lorenz, a Cassini radar team member from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. "This vast carbon inventory...

On the night of Feb. 20, the full moon will pass into Earth's shadow in an event that will be visible across all of the United States and Canada. The total lunar eclipse will be made even more striking by the presence of the nearby planet Saturn and the bright bluish star, Regulus. Eclipses in the distant past often terrified viewers who took them as evil omens. Certain lunar eclipses had an overwhelming effect on historic events. One of the most famous examples is the trick pulled by Christopher Columbus.

An asteroid at least 500 feet long will make a rare close pass by Earth next week, but there is no chance of an impact, scientists reported Thursday. The object, known as 2007 TU24, is expected to whiz by Earth on Tuesday with its closest approach at 334,000 miles, or about 1 1/2 times the distance of Earth to the moon. The nighttime encounter should be bright enough for medium-sized telescopes to get a glimpse, said Don Yeomans, manager of the Near-Earth Object Program Office at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which tracks potentially dangerous space rocks. However, next week's asteroid...

Perfectly Aligned Galaxies Found For the First Time John Roach for National Geographic NewsJanuary 11, 2008 Astronomers have found three galaxies in a never before seen perfect alignment—a discovery that may help scientists better understand the mysterious dark matter and dark energy believed to dominate the universe. The three galaxies are like beads on a string, one directly behind the other, scientists announced yesterday at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Austin, Texas. This makes the massive galaxy closest to Earth appear nestled in a pair of circular halos known as Einstein rings. The phenomenon occurs because the...

The quasar OJ287 contains two black holes (this slightly dated illustration lists the larger black hole's mass as 17 billion Suns, though researchers now estimate it is 18 billion Suns). The smaller black hole crashes through a disc of material around the larger one twice every orbit, creating bright outbursts (Illustration: VISPA) The most massive known black hole in the universe has been discovered, weighing in with the mass of 18 billion Suns. Observing the orbit of a smaller black hole around this monster has allowed astronomers to test Einstein's theory of general relativity with stronger gravitational fields than ever...

Meteors' mysterious origin traced to 1490 event 15:50 07 January 2008 NewScientist.com news service Stephen Battersby Last week's Quadrantid meteor shower was probably debris from a deep-space explosion that went off in the late 15th century, new observations reveal. The meteors, which return every January, were observed more closely than ever before when a group of 14 astronomers tracked them for nine hours on a flight from California, US, to the North Pole. They found that the shower peaked at around 0200 GMT on Friday, matching a prediction made by Peter Jenniskens of NASA. He based his prediction on the...

Also what is the difference between a reflector and refractor? Which is best?

Microsoft founder Bill Gates has donated ten million dollars to help build a 400-million dollar high-powered telescope in Chile, media here reported Saturday. Another Microsoft alumnus, Charles Simonyi, has donated 20 million dollars to the project, according to news reports. The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, which is expected to be operational as of 2015, is to be used by primarily by universities, laboratories and private groups. The mountainside observatory in northern Chile, equipped with a high-power digital lens and built at an altitude of more than 2,500 meters above sea level, will be capable of taking detailed photos of supernovas,...

This image shows newly discovered "hot spot" on Saturn's north pole and the mysterious hexagon that encircles the pole. Image credit: NASA/JPL/GSFC/Oxford University Despite more than a decade of winter darkness, Saturn's north pole is home to an unexpected hot spot remarkably similar to one at the planet's sunny south pole. The source of its heat is a mystery. Now, the first detailed views of the gas giant's high latitudes from the Cassini spacecraft reveal a matched set of hot cyclonic vortices, one at each pole. While scientists already knew about the hot spot at Saturn's south pole from...

The Quadrantid meteor shower is due to reach maximum in the predawn hours of Friday, Jan. 4. The Quadrantids are notoriously unpredictable, but if any year promises a fine display, this could be it.

Full moon near Mars on December 23 Earth & Sky Radio Series with hosts Deborah Byrd, Joel Block, Lindsay Patterson and Jorge Salazar. Sunday, December 23, 2007 For us in the U.S., the full moon is tonight. And if you look outside you’ll see this full moon near a blazing reddish light in our sky. It’s the planet Mars. Flying through space at 18 miles per second, Earth is about to go between the sun and Mars. Earth will pass between Mars and the sun tomorrow. So the distance between us and Mars is now about at its least for...

Mars will be unusually bright this Christmas Eve and the moon will be shining full — a development that might make Santa Claus rethink his need for Rudolph's red nose. That idea, from Miami Space Transit Planetarium director Jack Horkheimer, made us wonder if retooling a certain reindeer song is the best way to explain it to the kids: Mars is a red-tinged planet With a very shiny glow And if you look to see it You will find the moon in tow. The red planet will shine brighter because it will be directly opposite the sun, reflecting the most...

Enlarge ImageIce or dust? Could the bright areas in this image be a young and active martian glacier?Credit: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin (G. Neukum) Even though orbiters have eyed it from space and landers have rumbled across its surface, Mars still has more secrets to reveal. Two findings emerged this week: the possibility of an active glacier far from the planet's poles and evidence that sulfur--not carbon--was the element driving the planet's warmer climate long ago. Both discoveries could force some rethinking about martian evolution and dynamics--and maybe even provide insights about Earth's past. The glacier discovery was announced Wednesday by...

FORT WORTH (CBS 11 News) ― The Star of Bethlehem has befuddled scholars throughout the ages. Now, a Texas law professor claims to have scientific proof that the Star was real, and not purely biblical myth. He has another major discovery as well, which resulted from his study of the Star. Texas A&M adjunct law professor Frederick Larson began researching the Star after putting up a nativity scene for his daughter. The lawyer in him, Larson said, required him to investigate what it was that he was putting up in his front yard. Beginning with the book of Matthew, he...

For the first time astronomers have witnessed a supermassive black hole blasting its galactic neighbor with a deadly beam of energy.The "death star galaxy," as NASA astronomers called it, could obliterate the atmospheres of planets but also trigger the birth of stars in its wake of its destructive beam. Fortunately, the cosmic violence is a safe distance from our own neck of the cosmos."We've seen many jets produced by black holes, but this is the first time we've seen one punch into another galaxy like we're seeing here," said Dan Evans, astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge,...

NASA sends spacecraft on mission to comet Hartley 2 NASA/JPL NEWS RELEASE Posted: December 15, 2007 NASA has approved the retargeting of the Epoxi mission for a flyby of comet Hartley 2 on Oct. 11, 2010. Hartley 2 was chosen as Epoxi's destination after the initial target, comet Boethin, could not be found. Scientists theorize comet Boethin may have broken up into pieces too small for detection. The Epoxi mission melds two compelling science investigations -- the Extrasolar Planet Observation and Characterization and the Deep Impact Extended Investigation. Both investigations will be performed using the Deep Impact spacecraft. In addition...

SAN FRANCISCO - Scientists think they have discovered the energy source of the spectacular color displays seen in the northern lights. New data from NASA's Themis mission, a quintet of satellites launched this winter, found the energy comes from a stream of charged particles from the sun flowing like a current through twisted bundles of magnetic fields connecting Earth's upper atmosphere to the sun. The energy is then abruptly released in the form of a shimmering display of lights visible in the upper latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere, said principal investigator Vassilis Angelopoulos of the University of California, Los Angeles....

Despite funding uncertainty, NASA is on track to return humans to the moon by 2020 and set up a lunar outpost to serve as a springboard to explore Mars, officials said Monday. "Our job is to build towns on the moon and eventually put tire prints on Mars," NASA's Rick Gilbrech told reporters here, one year after the US space agency unveiled an ambitious plan to site a solar-powered, manned outpost on the south pole of the moon. "We have the International Space Station; we're going to have a lunar outpost, and someday, certainly, somebody will go to Mars," said...

You would think that a star anywhere from 400 to 200,000 times wider than the Sun would be fairly easy to detect. But not if it’s a ‘dark star,’ the name for a new, theoretical entity about to make its appearance in Physical Review Letters. Astrophysicist Paolo Gondolo (University of Utah) makes the case that dark matter would have affected the temperature and density of the gases that formed the first stars. Dark stars would mostly contain normal matter — hydrogen and helium — but they would have been much larger than the Sun, glowing largely in the infrared. Hypothetical...

At the end of October, Nobel Intent reported on a surprising astronomical event; periodic comet Holmes (17P) brightened over one million fold over the course of a single day. In mid-October, Comet Holmes was a "nonentity" in between the orbits of Jupiter and Mars. Then, on the evening of October 24th, backyard astronomers the world over (well, in the Northern Hemisphere) saw a new "star" in the constellation Perseus. At the time, no one was sure why this extreme brightening happened. Now, scientists have trained Hubble's Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 on Holmes to attempt to shed—or more accurately receive—light...

The notion that Comet Holmes is bigger than the Sun has been making the rounds on space-related websites of late. But is it true? According to a statement on astronomer Dave Jewitt's website, it is. "Formerly, the Sun was the largest object in the Solar System," the statement reads. "Now, comet 17P/Holmes holds that distinction." Jewitt works at the University of Hawaii, and is certainly an authority on icy denizens of the solar system, having co-discovered the first Kuiper Belt object. But what the statement is referring to is not the "body" of the comet, called the nucleus, which...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - NASA scientists said they discovered a fifth planet orbiting a star outside our own solar system and say the discovery suggests there are many solar systems that are, just like our own, packed with planets. The new planet is much bigger than Earth, but is a similar distance away from its sun, a star known as 55 Cancri, the astronomers said on Tuesday. Four planets had already been seen around the star, but the discovery marks the first time as many as five planets have been found orbiting a solar system outside our own with its eight...

VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- Engineers, scientists, and computer whizzes study or manipulate nature and machines to find sound, logical solutions to nagging questions and everyday problems. But if hard empirical evidence is what makes a techie brain tick, then how is he or she able to justify or believe in something as scientifically unprovable as God or as mind-boggling as transubstantiation? Jesuit Brother Guy Consolmagno, a self-described techie and Vatican astronomer, argues in a new book that a nerd is not necessarily a nihilist, and geeks can and do believe in God. In "God's Mechanics: How Scientists and Engineers Make...

Almost 20 years after it was first conceived, what will become the world's most powerful optical telescope is about to open its eyes. Lying beneath the clear skies of Arizona, the $120m (£55m) Large Binocular Telescope will allow astronomers to probe the Universe further back in time and in more detail than ever before. "The LBT is a very exciting step forward for astronomy," said Professor Gerry Gilmore of the Institute of Astronomy at the University of Cambridge, UK. "Not only is it big, but it is proving the practical implementation of some of the new technologies which will be...

An enormous cold spot in our universe could be explained by a cosmic defect in the fabric of space-time created shortly after the Big Bang, scientists say. If confirmed by future studies, the finding, detailed in the Oct. 25 issue of the journal Science, could provide cosmologists with a long-sought clue about how the infant universe evolved. But other scientists, and even members of the study team, are skeptical of the new claim. Cosmic ice cubes Scientists think that shortly after the Big Bang, as the universe cooled and expanded, exotic particles transformed into the particles we know today via...

The speed of light is the speed of light, and that's that. Right? Well, maybe not. Try and figure this out. Astronomers studying radiation coming from a distant galaxy found that the high energy gamma rays arrived a few minutes after the lower-energy photons, even though they were emitted at the same time. If true, this result would overturn Einstein's theory of relativity, which says that all photons should move at the speed of light. Uh oh Einstein. The discovery was made using the new MAGIC (Major Atmospheric Gamma-ray Imaging Cherenkov) telescope, located on a mountain top on the Canary...

ROME (CNS) -- The Vatican Observatory called together some of the world's top astronomers for a major conference on the creation and evolution of disk galaxies in an effort to better understand the nature of the universe. More than 200 men and women from 26 countries attended the Oct. 1-5 conference in Rome to share some of the discoveries since the Vatican's last galaxy conference in 2000. The observatory director, Argentine Jesuit Father Jose Funes, said they were able to attract top scientists and scholars for the meeting because "the Vatican Observatory is a prestigious institute, and the Holy See...

A piece of outer space named for George Takei is in kind of a rough neighborhood for somebody who steers a starship: an asteroid belt. An asteroid between Mars and Jupiter has been renamed 7307 Takei in honor of the actor, best known for his role as Hikaru Sulu in the original "Star Trek" series and movies. "I am now a heavenly body," Takei, 70, said Tuesday, laughing. "I found out about it yesterday. ... I was blown away. It came out of the clear, blue sky — just like an asteroid." The celestial rock, discovered by two Japanese astronomers...